debt clock

Friday, April 6, 2012

Over at Investors Business Daily, the essential John Merline puts the Paul Ryan/GOP budget plan - the one being castigated as the second coming of Herod's babykilling hit squad and worse by spendthrift critics - into the awful perspective it deserves.
When expressed in terms of percentage of GDP (far right), Ryan's plan is higher than historical averages when it comes both to outlays and revenues. When stacked up against Bill Clinton's 2000 budget using constant 2005 dollars, Ryan's plan pulls in the same amount of money while spending 50 percent more.
If that's what passes for "thinly veiled social Darwinism" - President Obama's phrase - the English language is as broke as the federal treasury.
To put the dime's worth of difference between the Ryan plan and Obama's for spending over the next decade, take a look at this chart by Reason columnist and Mercatus Center economist Veronique de Rugy.
Total projected spending for 10 years under the Ryan/House GOP plan runs to $40 trillion. Under Obama's framework, it comes to $45 trillion. The only real difference between the two is that Ryan zeroes out spending on The Affordable Care Act.
Under the Congressional Budget Office's "alternative scenario," which is based on likely renewal of certain policies, historical spending patterns, and a passing engagement with reality that is largely missing from legislative and executive branch budget plans, we'll spend $47 trillion over the next 10 years.

The capitalist system has lifted mankind out of mass poverty. It is this system that in the last century and in the last generation, has progressively changed the face of the world, and has provided the masses of mankind with amenities that even kings did not posses or imagine a few generations ago. - Henry Hazlitt

The American people will never knowingly adopt socialism. But, under the name of “liberalism”, they will adopt every fragment of the socialist program, until one day America will be a socialist nation, without knowing how it happened..I no longer need to run as a Presidential Candidate for the Socialist Party. The Democratic Party has adopted our platform. - Norman Thomas

So long as the people do not care to exercise their freedom, those who wish to tyrannize will do so; for tyrants are active and ardent, and will devote themselves in the name of any number of gods, religious and otherwise, to put shackles upon sleeping men. - Voltaire, 1764